People & HR

How to plan headcount as Event Agency Founders

People & HRFor Event Agency Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

When you're running a six-person event agency and Q4 hits with four galas, two brand activations, and a corporate retreat on the books simultaneously, figuring out whether you can staff all of them without burning out your core coordinators — or whether you need to bring on two freelance day-of coordinators and a rental logistics lead — lives in a Google Sheet that's already three versions out of date. You're cross-referencing Dubsado project timelines, your Gmail threads with freelancers, a separate tab for day rates, and your Plaid bank balance in another window to make sure the payroll float is there. Nobody owns this picture. You're rebuilding it from scratch every booking season.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Event Agency Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live headcount planning surface that maps every confirmed event on your calendar to the staff and freelancers required, with gaps flagged automatically so you know today — not the week of — where you're short-staffed

A budget-vs-actual view that shows your labor spend per event and per quarter pulled from your actual bank transactions, not a spreadsheet estimate, so you can see whether your day-rate freelancer budget is pacing to plan

A scenario model that shows you the cash impact of adding a full-time junior coordinator versus keeping your current freelancer-heavy model, using your real Stripe revenue and Plaid expense data as the baseline

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Budgeting Runway Analysis Scenario Analysis

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Plaid bank transaction data on a schedule so actual labor and vendor payments flow into your budget and runway views automatically. Starch syncs your Stripe data on a schedule to keep revenue figures current in the scenario model. Google Calendar connects from Starch's integration catalog so the agent queries your confirmed events live when building the staffing view. Gmail connects from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can reference freelancer confirmation threads and attach them to the right event in your headcount tracker.

Prompts to copy

Build me a headcount planning app for my event agency. I need to see every confirmed event this quarter, the roles needed for each one (lead coordinator, logistics, AV liaison, freelance day-of), whether each role is filled or open, the estimated labor cost per event, and a running total of what I've committed to spend on staff this quarter versus my budget. Pull my actual spending from Plaid so I can compare estimates to what I actually paid.

Build me a quarterly labor budget that breaks out full-time coordinator salaries, freelancer day rates, and vendor-facing staff costs as separate categories. Show me pace indicators — am I on track, under, or over in each category — and flag any event where my projected labor spend is more than 30% of the event's contracted revenue.

Show me two scenarios side by side: one where I hire a full-time junior coordinator at $52,000 per year starting in September, and one where I keep using freelancers at my current average rate. Use my Stripe revenue and Plaid transactions as the baseline. Show me runway, monthly burn, and the break-even point for each path.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Plaid in Starch so your business checking and any operating accounts sync automatically — this is what makes your labor spend numbers real instead of estimated.

2 Connect Stripe so your event deposits, final payments, and any recurring retainer revenue appear as the revenue side of every scenario you model.

3 Connect Google Calendar from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can pull your confirmed event dates and use them as the backbone of your staffing plan — every event on the calendar becomes a row in your headcount tracker.

4 Connect Gmail from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can reference your freelancer confirmation threads and flag which roles have received a confirmed 'yes' reply versus which are still pending.

5 Open the Budgeting app and describe your labor budget categories out loud: full-time salaries, freelancer day rates, travel and per diem for out-of-town events, and any staffing agency fees you use for large galas. Starch builds the category structure from your description.

6 Tell Starch to pull your last six months of Plaid transactions and auto-suggest budget allocations for each category based on what you've actually spent — this saves you from starting with blank fields and immediately shows you whether your mental model of labor costs matches reality.

7 Build the headcount planning app by describing every role type your agency staffs: lead coordinator, logistics coordinator, AV and tech liaison, freelance day-of coordinator, setup crew lead. Starch creates a staffing template you can apply to each event.

8 For each confirmed Q3 and Q4 event, assign required roles and mark which are filled (with names pulled from your Gmail confirmations) and which are open. Starch flags open roles on events within 30 days as high-priority gaps.

9 Open the Runway Analysis app to see your current burn rate with labor as the biggest line item broken out separately — this is the number you bring to any conversation about whether you can afford to hire full-time.

10 Run the Scenario Analysis with at least two models: your current freelancer-heavy approach versus adding one full-time hire. Enter the proposed salary, adjust your freelancer spend assumption downward to reflect what you'd stop outsourcing, and read the runway difference directly from the side-by-side output.

11 Set a weekly automation: every Monday, Starch pulls the current week's events from Google Calendar, checks which staffing roles are still open, and sends you a Slack summary of gaps that need to be filled before event day.

12 Each time you book a new event, describe it to Starch — event type, expected headcount, date, and venue — and Starch adds it to the headcount tracker with a suggested staffing template based on similar past events in your history.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

Q4 2025 staffing crunch — October through December

Sample numbers from a real run

Full-time coordinator salaries (2 FTE)	26,000
Freelance day-of coordinators — 11 event days	14,300
Freelance logistics leads — 4 large galas	8,800
AV and tech liaison (contract)	4,200
Travel and per diem — 2 out-of-town events	2,900
Total Q4 confirmed labor spend	56,200
Q4 contracted event revenue	148,500

You've got 9 confirmed events between October 1 and December 20, including a 400-person gala on November 14 and a corporate retreat in Scottsdale the following weekend. Your Budgeting app shows $56,200 in confirmed labor commitments against a $60,000 quarterly labor budget — you're at 94% capacity and it's only September 3. Three of those events still have open logistics lead roles, and the Scottsdale retreat has no confirmed AV liaison. Starch flags the November 14 gala and the Scottsdale retreat as high-priority gaps because both are within 75 days and have unfilled critical roles. The Runway Analysis pulls your Plaid data and shows net burn at $18,400 per month with Q4 revenue largely collected as deposits — Stripe shows $74,250 already received. You run the Scenario Analysis to model hiring a junior coordinator at $52,000 annually starting January: total runway extends from 9 months to 11 months because the salary is offset by a projected $22,000 reduction in freelancer spend over the first year. That's the number you bring to the decision — not a gut feeling, not a spreadsheet you updated last month.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Labor cost as a percentage of contracted event revenue per event (target: under 40%)

Open staffing roles within 60 days of event date — you want this at zero by T-30

Freelancer day-rate spend versus budget by quarter, tracked against Plaid actuals

Monthly net burn rate with labor broken out as a standalone line

Runway in months at current burn, updated weekly from Plaid and Stripe data

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Google Sheets headcount tracker + QuickBooks for actuals

Works, but your staffing sheet and your financial data are always in different tabs and never talk to each other — you're copying numbers manually every time you want a real picture.

HoneyBook or Dubsado project management

Great for client-facing workflows and contracts, but neither tool is built for internal headcount planning or multi-event labor budget tracking — you'd still need a separate spreadsheet for the staffing side.

Float or Harvest for resource planning

Float gives you a real resource calendar but requires manual time entry and has no connection to your bank transactions or revenue data — you can't see labor cost as a share of event revenue without exporting and rejoining the data yourself.

Hiring a fractional COO or operations consultant

A good fractional COO will build this picture for you, but they're working from the same disconnected data sources — they'll charge you $150/hour to maintain a spreadsheet that Starch keeps current automatically.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — quarterly budgeting, runway analysis, scenario planning all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

We use Dubsado for project management and client contracts. Can Starch pull event data from there?

Dubsado is reachable through Starch's integration catalog, so the agent can query it live when your headcount app needs event or project data. It won't sync on a schedule the way Plaid or Google Calendar does, but for pulling confirmed event details into your staffing view, a live query works well. Alternatively, if your event calendar lives in Google Calendar, that's the cleaner connection — Starch syncs it directly and the agent has typed event data to work with.

My labor spend is a mix of payroll for two full-timers and freelancer invoices I pay through bank transfer. Will both show up in the budget view?

Yes. Starch syncs your Plaid transactions on a schedule, so any outgoing payment from your connected business accounts — payroll ACH, freelancer bank transfers, contractor invoices paid via bill pay — shows up as actual spend. You tell Starch how to categorize them ('anything paid to [name] is a freelancer day rate for events') and it applies that logic going forward. You're not manually tagging every transaction.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I sometimes deal with corporate clients who ask about data security.

Not yet — Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If a corporate client requires SOC 2 compliance for any tool that touches their data, that's worth knowing upfront. For your internal headcount and financial planning workflows, where the data is your own bank transactions and staffing spreadsheets, most event agency founders find it's not a blocker.

Can Starch help me figure out which freelancers to re-book based on past event performance?

Yes — describe what you want and Starch builds it. Something like: 'Build me a freelancer tracker that logs each person's name, the events they've worked, their day rate, and a notes field for performance. Flag anyone I've used more than three times so I can prioritize them for re-booking.' If you've been sending post-event notes to yourself in Gmail, Starch can connect to Gmail from its integration catalog and surface those threads alongside each freelancer's record.

The Scenario Analysis app sounds useful for the hire-vs-freelancer decision. Can I model more than two scenarios?

Yes. You can build as many scenarios as you want — each one adjusts different assumptions (hire date, salary, how much freelancer spend you'd reduce, projected revenue growth) and shows you runway, burn, and break-even under those specific conditions. The baseline always comes from your real Stripe and Plaid data, so you're not modeling against made-up numbers.

What if I need to plan staffing for an event that's still a pending proposal, not a confirmed booking?

Tell Starch to add a 'status' field to your headcount tracker — confirmed, proposal sent, tentative — and to calculate your total committed labor spend using only confirmed events while showing you a separate view of what you'd need if pending proposals convert. That way you can see both your firm commitments and your best-case staffing load without conflating the two.